Distances to molecular clouds in SFR

We have recently developed a method which combines stellar photometric data with Gaia DR2 parallax measurements in a Bayesian framework to infer the distances of nearby dust clouds to a typical accuracy of ~5%. After refining the technique to target lower latitudes and incorporating deep optical data from DECam in the southern Galactic plane, we have derived a catalog of distances to molecular clouds in Reipurth (2008, Star Formation Handbook, vols I and II) which contains a large fraction of the molecular material in the solar neighborhood.

Comparison with distances derived from maser parallax measurements towards the same clouds shows our method produces consistent distances with <10% scatter for clouds across our entire distance spectrum (150pc-2.5kpc). We hope this catalog of homogeneous distances will serve as a baseline for future work.